Will tropical coral reefs be the first ecosystem to be eliminated by climate change?

Sunday, January 04, 2009

Resilience

A study that found a decline in calcification rates on the Great Barrier Reef (see Getting lumpy on the GBR) has recently received widespread media attention -- widespread, that is, compared to many stories that concern coral reefs.

Another recent story, reported by the BBC as Coral springs back from tsunami [1], would seem, at least for the non-specialist reader on first sight, to point in the opposite direction. But according Tom Goreau:

Indonesia has the highest rate of new coral settlement in the world, so areas that suffer only from physical devastation, and do not have high temperature, mud, or nutrients, do gradually get covered with corals. [It] takes...5-10 years or so in the best spots there, much longer elsewhere. But this is not resilience in the sense of resistance to stress, it is recovery via new recruitment, which is increasingly less frequent. It is like after the 1998 bleaching event in the Indian Ocean, when the [Big International NGOs] started touting reef "recovery" when they really only meant that the dying had stopped. The amount of new recruits in most of those places has been negligible to minor.

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"Mike", the world's first hydrogen bomb, vaporised Elugelap island and other parts of the Enewetak atoll on 1 November 1952. In the half century or so since then humans have destroyed around a quarter - some say a half - of all tropical coral reefs, which are one the world's richest and oldest ecosystems and provide vital benefits in over 100 countries. Will the rest be gone within another fifty years - or less? So what?

Please note that this blog is now pretty much 'on hold', with only occasional updates since January 2008. For notes on the Anthropocene extinction and what comes next see The Book of Barely Imagined Beings.